American Reunion|Woodruff Park, Atlanta — Six Downtown Acres, Briefly Michigan

Six acres in the middle of downtown Atlanta, bounded by Peachtree Street, Edgewood Avenue and Park Place. Woodruff Park is the closest thing the city has to a town green, and American Reunion filmed here in the summer of 2011, the only piece of the production that used a real skyline instead of borrowing a small town.

It is a working park rather than a scenic one. Office workers eat lunch on the wall. Georgia State students cut across it between classes. Demonstrations start here and sometimes end here. There is a fountain, a performance pavilion, and Gamba Quirino's bronze Atlanta from the Ashes, dedicated in 1969 and rededicated in 1995: a woman lifting a phoenix over her head, the city's own myth about burning down and coming back.

That sculpture is worth the walk on its own if you have just watched a film about people returning to the place that made them. The joke writes itself, and the bronze got there forty-three years first.

The park is free, open, and served by the Atlanta Streetcar. Take the Edgewood Avenue side in late afternoon, when the towers throw shade across the grass and the traffic noise finally drops off. Downtown Atlanta stood in for a Michigan city here for a few days. Nobody working in the building opposite noticed.